Teaching History from the South. A Transatlantic approach

LAURA EFRON

Durban

Conferencia; International Conference on History Education in Africa; 2015

University of KwaZulu-Natal

Teaching the History of the Slave Trade at high school brings out a bunch of questions over the history of national identities, culture and racism. While it seems to be an issue that has been taught all over the continents as part of the World history ?promoting the capitalistic system development-, it still remains enchained to a Eurocentric discourse. The History of the Slave Trade involved not only the Europeans as the main agents but also the African elites, the Latin American elites and the slaves themselves. However, how is that history taught at schools? Which place does it have in the curriculum? How do textbooks explain its causes and consequences? The way in which that history is taught reflects the way in which societies see themselves in the international context. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the Slave Trade History is taught in high school at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. We choose two special study cases in which the Slave Trade had an alternative impact, different from the Western African cases or the Caribbean cases: the South African and the Argentinean cases. We will compare how national curriculums and textbooks present the theme and how they link it to the national and international history. Promoting this dialogue will allow us to reconstruct a more profound and global perspective on the teaching of history in the South.